Robert Hutchings Goddard
In 1898, a
teenage Robert Goddard found his life purpose -- in the pages of a Boston newspaper.
Captivated by the compelling realism of a serialized version of H. G. Wells' War of the
Worlds, he "imagined how wonderful it would be to make some device which had even the
possibility of ascending to Mars."1 He began enthusiastically filling
notebooks with ideas for getting off the planet.
While Goddard was a graduate student in physics at Clark College, his youthful speculations crystallized into the pursuit of rocketry. Later, as a professor at Clark, his research began in earnest with a grant from the Smithsonian Institution. For the next twelve years, with intermittent Smithsonian support and occasional funding from other sources, Goddard achieved, in his spare time, many notable firsts in rocketry, including the construction and flight of the first liquid fuel rockets.
A 1929 news account of one of Goddard's outdoor tests caught the attention of Charles Lindbergh who quickly became an avid supporter. Funding arranged by Lindbergh, largely from the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Foundation, made it possible for Goddard to work on rocketry full time and on a much larger scale. A search for open spaces and good year round weather led him to Roswell, New Mexico, a place, as his wife Esther would remark, "where we would not bother anyone, and no one would bother us." 2
In the
Summer of 1930, the Goddards and a crew of four arrived at Mescalero Ranch, a 10-acre farm
at the edge of Roswell. A test stand and workshop were built adjacent to the house. With
the permission of a local rancher a launch tower was constructed on a section of secluded
prairie about 10 miles outside of town. Over the next twelve years Goddard and his crew
made major strides in rocket propulsion, as well as the practical matters of launch
control, stabilization, tracking, and recovery. In all, there were 56 flight tests in
Roswell, with 17 flights reaching over 1000 feet in altitude. Unfortunately, just as the
work was truly coming to fruition, a WW2 contract required Goddard to abandon his flight
testing and turn his attention to specialized rockets for assisting heavily laden aircraft
during takeoff. He died while under Navy contract in Annapolis, Maryland.
After the war, rocketry grew quickly into a large scale enterprise. Owing largely to the far greater pace of wartime rocketry in Germany, and in part to his own secrecy, Dr. Goddard was all but forgotten. It was only through the diligence of his widow Esther, that many details of his pioneering work were finally brought to light. Some 214 patents were eventually awarded to Dr. Goddard, more than three quarters posthumously. In 1960 the armed forces and NASA paid one million dollars, the largest government patent settlement then on record, for prior infringement and continued use of Dr. Goddard's ideas. The recognition that this prescient inventor so richly deserved finally followed, including a Congressional Medal which Mrs. Goddard accepted in his memory in 1961.
An exhibit at The Roswell Museum and Art Center contains four major components:
1) An
extensive collection of assemblies, tools, and documents spanning all phases of Dr.
Goddard's development of rockets between 1915 and 1945 including the first liquid fuel
rocket, built in 1925, and several other nearly complete rockets.
2) An accurate full scale reproduction of Dr. Goddard's Roswell workshop as it appeared in the mid-1930's, featuring many of his original machine tools.
3) Dr. Goddard's Roswell launch tower, 1930-1942, which was transported from its original site on the prairie to the museum lawn in 1949.
4) A NASA Apollo XVII display featuring a space suit worn on the Moon by New Mexico geologist and astronaut Dr. Harrison Schmitt and a small fragment of one of the samples that he brought back. Dr. Schmitt visited the Moon in December of 1972, with the help of a rocket much larger than, but in many ways similar to what Dr. Goddard had been flight testing in Roswell some four decades earlier. Dr. Goddard's first public suggestion of the feasibility of reaching the Moon appeared in his 1919 publication A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes.
W. S. Crane
References:
This High Man, Milton Lehman, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, New York (1963).
The Papers of Robert H. Goddard, edited by Esther C. Goddard and G. Edward Pendray,
McGraw-Hill, New York (1970).
A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes, Robert H. Goddard, Smithsonian Institution,
Washington DC (1919).
1 "Material for an Autobiography", The Papers of Robert H. Goddard (1970) p.
7-9.
2 Esther Goddard interview in the documentary series Charles Blair's Better World,
Archives Unlimited Corporation (1972).
Links to other Goddard materials
National Inventor's Hall of Fame